1. Technical Field
The present invention is directed to a computer-implemented integrated travel system that automatically publishes in real-time a user's travel-related information based on the occurrence of events to a user contact community through several media types (social network applications, mobile and web-based devices).
2. Background
Typical modern travel booking systems utilize passenger records which are associated with and contain information relating to specific bookings, such as a booked flight, which are stored in a reservation system. The passenger record may be a passenger name record (“PNR”), and the reservation system may be a global distribution system (“GDS”). A GDS is a computer reservation system typically utilized jointly by airlines in different countries, that includes reservation databases of suppliers in many countries.
Additionally, there are numerous systems and methods for integrating social networking information and for generating and sending location-based messages to members of a user's community, such as his or her social network. Many of these systems provide for the customization of both the content and media type of the communication messages, and further provide for the ability to determine the geo-position of a user, and the ability to communicate this information to members of a user's community, such as his or her social network.
However, these systems generally require users to stay connected with the system when communicating this information to the members of a user's social network, which is a problem when users do not have access to the internet. These systems do not seamlessly integrate social networks and travel reservations to provide for the automatic publication of information as events occur in real-time. Accordingly, the publication of information to one's social network community is often manual and is not instantaneous upon the occurrence of an event. Additionally, these systems generally do not seamlessly facilitate the automatic sharing of information to multiple users on multiple systems via multiple communications media concurrently.